Golfers are no strangers to dress codes. But even the Wimbledon dress code makes some players shudder. The famously strict mandate of all-white attire dates back to the 1880s, when it was considered bad form to boast sweat stains. To this day, you can still only show a trim of color on the court. You must wear crisp white. Not eggshell, or seafoam, or sand dune. (In 2022, the board did update its rules to allow women to play in colored undershorts, provided they don’t show beneath their skirts.) New data collected by SportsHandle, a betting analysis site, has found that in golf majors, even when there is no shirt-color requirement, winners most often wear white. For example, 20 percent of winners from 1964 (with the dawn of color photographs) to 2023 at the PGA Championship wore white shirts, and a whopping 40 percent wore white hats to boot. Data from the U.S. Open confirmed the trend, finding that 23 percent of winners wore white on the last day of the round, and nearly half of all winners—that’s 48 percent—wore white hats.
